Databases are employed in various demanding applications, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM), search engines, corporate billing applications, and so on. Desired database performance characteristics may depend upon how computing resources are allocated to given tasks. In general, it is desirable to improve the speed or efficiency of a database search or query.
A database may be any collection of data. Computing resources may be any devices or mechanisms used to perform a computation or task involving one or more software or hardware instructions. Examples of computing resources include central processing unit (CPU) time or cycles allotted to a given computing task, memory such as disc storage space or Random Access Memory (RAM), network bandwidth or transfer mechanisms, etc.
Resource management is particularly important in database computing environments that include substantial amounts of old, rarely used data, in addition to recent and/or frequently used data. To facilitate managing data-storage resources, tools, products such as Oracle's Information Management Lifecycle (ILM) software and/or Oracle's Automatic Storage Management (ASM) may be employed. Such applications may facilitate organizing and separating relatively recent data from older, rarely used, accessed, or modified data. Data management policies may be assigned to different groups of data.